The Anabaptists and Minor Sects in the Reformation

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HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

Volume XI JULY, 1918 Number 3

THE ANABAPTISTS AND MINOR SECTS IN
THE REFORMATION

RUFUS M. JONES

Havekfokd College

Parallel with the main current of the Protestant
Reformation there ran from the very beginning another
powerful current which has always received far less con-
sideration from historians than it deserves. Some have
supposed it to be a mis-guided, if not a monstrous, under-
taking. Others have considered it one more among the
many "lost causes" about which history is more or less
silent. Neither of these positions is, however, quite
tenable. It was, like Bunker Hill in the American
Revolution, "a battle lost but a cause won," since nearly
everything which these minor reformers aimed at has
since been achieved or is on the way to achievement.

The leaders of this parallel movement were ruthlessly
martyred, their followers were exterminated, their books
and tracts were suppressed, their aims were slanderously
misinterpreted, their brave efforts were as rapidly as pos-
sible overwhelmed with oblivion; but strangely enough
their ideas have triumphed. Their truths — though
they themselves are dead — are marching on, like John
Brown's spirit. Their vision of what Christianity should
be is much closer to the heart of our own religion today
in England and America than is either the theology

224 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

of Luther or the dogmatic system of Calvin. There is
no occasion to belittle the service of the great reformers,
the reformers of folio size, like Luther, Calvin, and
Zwingli. They did a monumental piece of work; they
changed the course of history decidedly for the better,
and they have been given, and rightly so, their place
with the immortals. There is, nevertheless, much lum-
ber, sheer dead wood, in their semi-mediaeval systems.
They carried on many aspects of pre-Reformation Chris-
tianity which might profitably have been sloughed off,
and they loaded human minds and hearts with some
tragic burdens which might well have been spared. It
is no doubt easier to see that fact today than it was
to see it four hundred years ago, and we ought not to
expect at the beginning of a period the critical insight
which comes through the cumulative experience of the
years.

These neglected reformers — of the quarto or octavo
size perhaps — did see on the spot then that much of the
wood in the new systems was already dead, that many
of the tragic burdens which the reformers were loading
on human shoulders were too heavy to be borne, and were
in any case unnecessary. They wanted a "root and
branch" reformation, a thorough-going reformation, a
radical purification and reorganization. Though they
belonged to the scholarly class, and came, almost with-
out exception, from the universities, they were in deep
sympathy with the people. They thought and spoke
for toilers and peasants. They had entered into the
meaning of the social struggle and had come under the
burden of human suffering; they intensely felt the social
wrongs of the world, and they came forth as the cham-
pions of the reformation which the common man needed
and demanded. They failed in their day to carry
through their programme, but it was in the main a noble
aspiration, much of it was wisely conceived, historical

ANABAPTISTS AND MINOR SECTS 225

experience has confirmed many of the aims embodied in
it, and it deserves patient and impartial, if not sympa-
thetic, study.

One of the most interesting historical questions is that
concerned with the spiritual pedigree of the movement,
or more properly of the movements, for it was not ever,
as we shall see, well unified into any single system. There
must obviously have been some pre-Reformation prepa-
ration for it, since it burst forth almost simultaneously
at many widely sundered places, in many lands, and it
accumulated at once an immense popular volume and
momentum. Wherever it appeared it took on, with all
its particular variations, striking similarities, at least in
its central purpose and its fundamental principles. The
leaders plainly had a large stock of ideas and ideals in
common. There must have been some background ex-
planation. Unfortunately it is not possible yet to pro-
duce definite documentary evidence to prove beyond
question that these new groups which formed at the
beginning of the Reformation were the direct product
of earlier groups of mystics, Waldenses, Wyclifites,
Hussites, Brothers of the Common Life, or Spiritual
Franciscans. 1 And yet it is an unmistakable fact that
there did exist in unbroken succession, especially through
the Rhine valley and in Switzerland, hidden groups of
"heretics" and mystics. The puritan-minded Waldenses
were never suppressed on the continent, as the Lollards
never were in England. The writings of the mystics of
the fourteenth, and especially the writings of the great
Brother of the Common Life, Thomas a Kempis of
the fifteenth century, were widely circulated and de-
votedly read. These books, as we now know, exercised

1 Ludwig Keller was convinced that his researches established this point, but other
scholars, including Dr. Ernst Troeltsch, do not endorse his claim. See especially
Keller's Ein Apostel der Wiedertaufer. Troeltsch's great work, Die Soziallehren der
christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen (Tubingen, 1912), is a very valuable contribution
in this field, and I have carefully re-read the section of it bearing on my subject before
writing this article.

226 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

a profound influence on Luther, and there is much to
indicate that they exerted a still more profound influence
upon the popular leaders with whom we are now con-
cerned. The essential reason for thinking so is that the
body of ideas in the new movement is uniformly so har-
monious and consonant with the teaching and aspirations
of these mystics and with the heretical groups which had
already suggested the lines of reformation that were
needed to restore real, that is, apostolic, Christianity.

Two events woke the quiet, long-suffering successors
of the mystics and heretical groups from mere dumb
hopes to eager, vivid expectation — the powerful teaching
of the humanists and the dynamic message of Luther. It
is impossible to miss or ignore the direct influence of the
humanists upon the leaders of this common-man's refor-
mation. It is most apparent in the new social and ethical
emphasis. They one and all show a revolt from the old
theology. It has lost both its interest and its reality for
them. Something else more real and more appealing has
come into the foreground of their consciousness. They
have drawn much closer to the Jesus of the Gospel than
had anybody else since St. Francis. They are more
attracted to Him and to His wonderful words than to the
elaborate metaphysical accounts of His being and nature.
They turn eagerly to the positive teachings of this great
Master of life as they find them revealed in the New
Testament, which the humanists had helped them dis-
cover. They learned too from these same humanists how
vastly different the Church of their time was from the
Church in its pristine apostolic purity and power. Then
came Luther's electrifying message of faith and freedom,
shaking them entirely awake. They almost all refer
to his quick and powerful word. They rose at once to
meet it. They thought he was to lead them into a new
epoch and be their champion in the work of building a
new Church. The Liberty of a Christian Man and the

ANABAPTISTS AND MINOR SECTS 227

Babylonian Captivity of the Church, as they read them in
1520, seemed like a new revelation from God. They felt
that the hour had struck and that the new heaven and
the new earth were within hail.

Two pretty clearly marked tendencies appear in this
general effort of the period to secure the type of reforma-
tion which the common man was striving for, though it
must be recognized that the entire undertaking always
remained throughout somewhat fluid, uncompact, and un-
organized. The two typical tendencies were: (1) in the
direction of what is historically denominated "Anabap-
tism"; and (2) a serious aim to work out a truly spiritual
Christianity, winnowed of the accumulations of pagan-
ism, superstition, theology, and secularism. We may
therefore loosely divide the leaders of the popular move-
ment into "Anabaptists" and "Spiritual Reformers,"
though the division is not a sharp one, and some leaders
do not easily come under either label while others seem
to come under both labels. The Anabaptists numerically
bulk much larger than the second group, though in
historical influence the former are not more important
than the latter. The first group of Anabaptists to
differentiate and to formulate and express its principles
was the Swiss group in and about Zurich and St. Gall.
The leaders were young scholars and priests whose hearts,
"under the cross," had been made one with the common
people. They were genuine shepherds of the flock.

The most important men who led this movement were
Conrad Grebel, Felix Manz, William Reublin, Simon
Stumpff, and Ludwig Hetzer. They had all been power-
fully affected by their reading and study of the Bible,
now for the first time truly a book of the people. They
began to preach to their flocks a fresh message drawn
from the prophets and the Gospel. The popular response
was immediate, and they found themselves, without
intending it, the champions of a new cause. As Zwingli

228 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

moved forward to secure a reformation of the Swiss
Churches, these men gladly joined him and were content
to follow his leading. They soon discovered, however,
that he was moving toward a reformation which was far
too restrained and limited to suit their conception of
what the times demanded. They engaged in public dis-
cussions with him, and found that he was voicing the
reforming aims of the nobles and upper class but was
unresponsive to the deep needs of the masses whom they
represented. Gradually they felt compelled to deviate
from the course which Zwingli was steering and to pro-
claim a more radical programme. They came across the
writings of the "new prophets" of the people, Thomas
Mtinzer and Carlstadt, and they deeply sympathized
with the aspiration for a more inward religion which
these men voiced, but they thoroughly disapproved of
Mtinzer's support of popular insurrection and his passion-
ate appeal for the oppressed to use the sword. They
declined to employ the world's way to success and trusted
wholly to the inherent power of ideas and to the in-
visible help of God. What they demanded as the most
urgent need of the times was the complete reformation
of the Church to make it fit the New Testament. They
insisted first of all that the Church of Christ must be
" a congregation of believers." Only those, they claimed,
who have hearts of faith, spiritual insight, obedient wills,
and real religious experience can compose a Christian
Church. A mixed multitude of good and bad, of saints
and sinners, cannot make a true Church. The historical
compromise with the world, the scaling of the Christian
standards down to the level of the nominal, secular
membership, seemed to them to be the greatest source
of the "apostasy" of the Church. They now proposed
to wipe the slate clean, to make a new start, and to form
a Church consisting only of Christians, only of the faith-
ful. It seemed to them that the custom of baptizing

ANABAPTISTS AND MINOR SECTS 229

infants, who from the nature of the case could not exer-
cise faith, was one fertile cause of the degeneracy. It
stood in their eyes as the mark of apostasy from Apostolic
Christianity, somewhat as circumcision stood out, for
St. Paul in the Galatian controversy, as the peculiar mark
of Judaistic legalism. If the Church were henceforth
to be pure and Christian, then it must have no rites or
practices which did not attach directly to personal faith,
and it must have no members who had not positively
experienced in their own souls a living faith. They
had little primary interest in sacraments at best, since
their main concern was for a strongly ethical and social
Christianity, but they believed that the primitive Chris-
tians practised baptism as an outward sign of an inward
experience and as a testimony of fellowship in a visible
Church. They proposed therefore to restore baptism to
this primitive, apostolic function. In 1525 Grebel bap-
tized Blaurock, a devoted Christian man and one of the
band of preachers who had accepted the radical attitude.
Blaurock thereupon, "in deep fear of God," baptized
many others, and a community of "brothers," as they
liked to call themselves, began to grow and to differenti-
ate from the main Zwinglian Reformation. These dis-
senters were given the nickname "Anabaptists," which
means re-baptizers, and the name stuck to them and
widened out to include almost all types of persons who
dissented from the Roman and Reformed Churches. It
became the opprobrious label for the entire effort of the
common man for a reformation. The Swiss dissenters
themselves refused to accept the name or to admit its
implication. They declared that they were not "re-
baptizers." The baptism which they had received as
infants, they claimed, was no baptism at all, since bap-
tism cannot take place without positive personal faith
on the part of the recipient. Adult baptism taken in
faith as a sign of fellowship in the pure church of Christ

230 HAEVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

was, in their view, the one and only baptism — not a
"second baptism."

As their aims grew defined, the Anabaptists endeavored
(1) to construct a Church entirely on the model of the
New Testament, in every particular a copy of the apostolic
pattern. (2) This was to be a visible Church, composed
only of believers, a community of saints, winnowed and
separated from the unbelieving and unspiritual. (3)
This state of purity in the Church was to be preserved by
a rigorous use of discipline. Those who fall below the
Christian standard and become corrupt or contaminated
by the world, or who compromise with the world, must
be excluded by ban from membership in the Church, that
is, there must be a continuous use of the winnowing fan.
(4) The Church must be completely severed from all
entangling alliance with the state. The Church and State
have officially nothing in common. Membership in the
former is a free act. There must be no kind of compulsion
in spiritual matters. Through faith and experience the
Church lives and grows and enlarges its fellowship. It
influences the character of those who form the State,
but its authority is indirect, not direct. In the sphere
of religion the State has no authority; conscience in its
relation with God is to be absolutely free and untram-
melled. (5) All Christians have the same fundamental
rights as the clergy have. There are no classes, no
orders, no fixed distinctions. The only differences are
differences of gift and function. (6) The movement
tended, though more or less unconsciously, to treat the
Gospel as "a new law," to be literally followed and
obeyed, very much as was done in the earlier groups of
Waldenses and Lollards. Under this influence most
branches of the Anabaptists refused to take oaths, set
themselves against war, and denied that a Christian is
allowed under any circumstances to take human life.
With this rigorous literalism they also joined a moral

ANABAPTISTS AND MINOR SECTS 231

strictness of life more extreme than that which marked
any other section of the Reformation, even that of the
Calvinistic churches. (7) They not only proclaimed
freedom of conscience; they bore a powerful testimony
to the august authority of conscience. They arrived at
the conviction that conscience is an inner sanctuary or
shechinah of God Himself, and here as nowhere else
they believed the voice of the living God is heard. With
this exalted sense of an inner connection with the divine,
they suffered and died for what seemed to them eternal
truth and everlasting righteousness, and in doing so they
gave a new note of emphasis to the moral worth of
conscience.

Two very powerful leaders, of German origin and educa-
tion, soon threw in their lot with the Swiss dissenters
and stood out at once as the prophets of the new move-
ment, Baltazar Hiibmaier, born near Augsburg in 1480,
and Hans Denck, a Bavarian, born about 1495. Hiib-
maier was a Doctor of Theology, one of the best scholars
of his time, a humanist, a mystic, a powerful preacher,
a high-minded, pure-hearted, brave man, and finally,
in 1528, a martyr. His watchword, used on the title-
page of his little books, was "Truth is immortal," and he
maintained, even in the face of death, that truth ultimately
wins in any contest. He accepted in full measure
Luther's claim that faith — the soul's attitude of trust
and confidence in God — is the fundamental basis of
Christianity; only he went farther with the principle
than Luther did and carried it out more consistently.
Nothing in the sphere of religion can be accomplished,
he held, without insight, faith, obedience, effort, con-
formity of heart and will with God. Religion must be
from first to last a spiritual affair. Rites, ceremonies,
magical or sacerdotal performances, cannot alter the
ethical and inherent facts of life. "God," he declared in
his Apology, "will have none of our Baal-cries." With

232 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

this central position fixed, Hubmaier labored valiantly
to secure a reformation of the Church consonant with
the spiritual character of apostolic Christianity. "I
believe and confess" he wrote, "a holy catholic Church,
which is a communion of saints, a brotherhood of devout
and believing men." 2 Very large numbers were con-
vinced by Hiibmaier's preaching, and when his lips were
sealed by the fagots in Vienna he had already carried
his interpretation of religion into many lives both in
Swiss and Austrian towns. 3

Denck belongs very definitely among the "Spiritual
Reformers"; but he was for a time identified with the
Anabaptists and he undoubtedly exerted a very strong in-
fluence upon the movement in its early stage, though as
his insight deepened and his views matured, his interpre-
tation of Christianity took a broader outlook and a more
universal aspect than most Anabaptists were ready for.
For more than a year — September, 1525, to October, 1526
— Denck was in Augsburg endeavoring to organize and
direct the popular movement toward reform, striving
to check fanatical tendencies, opposing literalists and
extremists, and putting forth strenuous efforts to deepen
and spiritualize the throngs of enthusiastic "seekers."

Before the Anabaptist leaders had any opportunity to
clarify their aims or to formulate their principles, the
world took fright at the potential dangers of the move-
ment and began suppressing the prominent exponents of
it and endeavoring to obliterate it utterly. The uprising
of the German peasants in 1525, in the hope of securing
for themselves a measure of economic and social justice,
gave the ruling class and the nobles a vivid sense of what
might happen if these submerged peoples awakened,
found themselves, and became an organized and directed

2 Hiibmaier's Twelve Articles of Faith.

3 It is estimated that six thousand persons became Anabaptists in and around
Nikolsburg where Hubmaier preached.

ANABAPTISTS AND MINOR SECTS 233

force. Luther threw all the power of his pen, voice, and
personality against the cause of the peasants. He wrote:
"Whoever can should knock down, strangle, and stab
insurgents, privately or publicly, and think nothing so
venomous, pernicious, and devilish as an insurgent."
He declared that those who died fighting against the
peasants were "true martyrs before God," and that
those who perish on the peasant side are "everlasting
hell-brands." i The long-suffering peasants, driven to
the limit of endurance by their intolerable condition
and inspired by the hope which the dawning reformation
gave them, made their assault against the immovable
wall of German authority, and failed. Miinzer, the
spiritual champion of their aspirations, went to death
with them.

The early Anabaptist leaders, most of whom owed
much to the dynamic, if not wisely directed zeal of Mtin-
zer, disapproved of the appeal to force and set themselves
against insurrection. The Zurich society of "brothers"
wrote to Miinzer in September, 1524, urging him not
to resort to violence. They say: "The Gospel and its
followers should not be guarded by the sword, neither
shall they so guard themselves, as, by what we hear
from the Brethren, ye assume and pretend to be right.
Truly-believing Christians are sheep in the midst of
wolves, sheep ready for the slaughter; they must be
baptized in fear and in need, in tribulation and death,
that they may be tried to the last, and enter the father-
land of eternal peace, not with carnal but with spiritual
weapons. They use neither the sword nor war. " 6 In
spite of this gentle attitude, which beyond question
characterized the main current of the popular reforma-
tion, all existing authorities, both of Church and State,
were seized with intense antipathy toward these spiritual

4 Luther's tract, Wider die Mordischen und Reubischen Rotter der Bauern.

5 Letter written by Grebel to Miinzer.

234 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

strivings of the common man, rose in might, and stamped
it out in blood and fire. All the early leaders were either
killed outright or so severely treated that death over-
took them prematurely. The members of the group of
"brothers" were dealt with as pests and outcasts, harried,
imprisoned, banished, forced to live like beasts in dens
and caves of the earth. It is impossible to tell what
would have been the social and spiritual effect of this
popular movement — which apparently, judging from
its enthusiastic beginnings, would have swept in the
common people of all countries — if it had been allowed
to develope and realize its aims. 6 Its first leaders were
honest, sincere, unselfish men. They had no hostile
intent. They sought no personal power or aggrandize-
ment. They had no spirit of hate. They were fired with
no class-animus. One of Denck's disciples, Hans
Langenmantel, said: "The highest command of God is
Love. Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and
thy neighbor as thyself." They denied that it is right to
try to gain spiritual ends by violence and sword. They
trusted everything to the immortal power of truth, to
the transforming force of ideas. They meant to in-
augurate a Church which would expand and become the
Kingdom of God on earth. They found a Golgotha
instead.

The fury of the persecution, the appalling method of
answering their dumb aspirations, produced at once a
new type of leader and drove many of the Anabaptists
toward fanaticism. Melchior Hoffman of Strasburg and
his disciples are a different type from those whom
I have considered. Always inclined to literalism, the
movement now focussed upon a fervid expectation of
the fulfilment of millennial hopes. Hoffman became the
prophet of an intense chiliasm, and even proclaimed that

6 Even in the face of the terrific persecution that came down upon it as soon as
it began, there were many thousands of Anabaptists in Middle Europe, and it has been
estimated that thirty thousand were put to death in Holland alone.

ANABAPTISTS AND MINOK SECTS 235

the sword might be used to hasten the expected Kingdom
of God. His Dutch disciples, Jan Matthys and Jan
Bockelson, pushed the fanaticism, of the radical wing
to its wildest limit, and gave to the world by the spectacle
of the Minister kingdom, a reason for the horror of Ana-
baptism and an excuse, after the fact, for its method of
thorough extermination. 7

A remnant of the original stock survived the double
tragedy of persecution and fanaticism. The followers
of Jacob Huter, a Tyrolese Anabaptist, who worked out
a very interesting type of communistic society, suc-
ceeded in escaping from the annihilating persecutions of
the Tyrol and migrated into Moravia. Eventually
Huter was martyred. His last despairing cry is touch-
ing: "We know that it is not allowable to forbid the
earth to us, for the earth is the Heavenly Father's."
Huter's Communities were driven from place to place
and reduced in numbers, but they were never wholly
eradicated or suppressed. The Mennonites form another
group of survivors. They owe their name and many
of their characteristics to Menno Simon, born in West
Friesland about 1496. He set himself to winnowing out
the follies and fanaticisms of the Dutch Anabaptists,
and he succeeded in organizing a strong branch of the
movement, which has survived to the present time. He
carried a puritan spirit into his group of followers, a
determination to take the commands of Christ literally,
and a tendency to form "a peculiar people," distinguished
by dress, manners, separation from public affairs, and
absence of ordained or salaried ministry. Sporadic in-
dividuals and even groups of Anabaptists escaped the
violent Protestant and Catholic persecutions in most of
the continental countries, and a large number, in one way
or another, got into England. They merged with the

7 Hans Hut, a disciple of Miinzer, also preached apocalyptic hopes, though, un-
like Hoffman, he remained non-resistant.

236 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

Lollards, and in some cases managed to escape the fires
of Smithfield. They helped to form the numerous groups
of heretics and dissenters which swarmed during the
freer time of the English Commonwealth. They formed
also the early nucleus of the famous Baptist Societies
out of which the Baptists sprang.

The other fundamental tendency, which I have called
the aim at a "spiritual reformation," was even more
viscous or fluid, less compact and unified, than was the
Anabaptist movement. One reason for the lack of
organization and solidification is to be found in the
strong mystical aspect of this reforming movement. Its
leaders were hostile to systems. They were in revolt
against dogmas, and they were equally opposed to the
tyranny of authoritative, State-controlled, ecclesiastical
institutions. They wanted to escape alike from a
Hellenized and a Romanized Christianity. They saw
no way to solve the problem without a complete shift
of emphasis from the outward to the inward. The
visible Church had tightened itself around the human
spirit until no free area or independent sphere of activity
seemed left for man's soul in its own right. These
minor prophets of the Reformation were primarily
prophets of the soul, champions of the free spirit. They
had no architectonic genius. They felt no interest in
rearing either structures of logic or institutional struct-
ures. Like Copernicus, they proposed a new centre,
and their new centre was man's soul. They were always
thinking and writing about the Church; but it was from
first to last an invisible Church about which they were
concerned, not the visible and empirical one. It is in
this point that they differ most from the Anabaptists,
with whom they had close sympathy and often warm
fellowship. The Anabaptists were eager to create a
new visible Church, and they took the written word of
Scripture as their charter for it. The "Spiritual Re-

ANABAPTISTS AND MINOR SECTS 237

formers" accepted neither of those positions. They
found the ultimate basis of religion in the Word of God,
the Light of God, revealed in the interior life of man,
and they thought of the Church as a spiritual organism
of illuminated and inwardly guided persons. They were
deeply read in the books of the German and Flemish
mystics — Eckhart, Tauler, Ruysbroeck, Theologia Ger-
manica, the writings of "the Friends of God," and The
Imitation of Christ, but they were almost as much in-
fluenced by the Humanists, especially by Erasmus.
They shared his faith in human freedom, his strong
emphasis on the ethical aspect of the true Christian life,
his dislike of theological dogma, and his appreciation
of the pure and simple "gospel." They are mystics,
but they are distinctly a new type of mystics. Through
their dislike for theology and metaphysics they allowed
the speculative element, which is so large a feature of
fourteenth-century mysticism, to fall away, and they
consequently made the positive, affirmative way of
relationship with God much more prominent than the
via negativa of the earlier mystics. In short, they were
more interested in direct experience than they were in
logic.

So far as one can locate any "originator" of the move-
ment — which, after all, stands out very much like Mel-
chizedek, without historical " father or mother " — Thomas
Miinzer was the first person in the Reformation period
to make the living Voice or Word of God in the soul
the basis of religion. The interior Teacher seemed to
him the source of truth and the guide of life. He was
unfortunately a loosely organized individual, lacking in
balance and capable of being stirred to fanaticism. But
he planted his idea in the heart of Ludwig Hetzer, trans-
lator of the Hebrew Prophets, and Hans Denck, the
humanist school-master of St. Sebald School in Nurem-
berg, and it came to resurrection-life and power in

238 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

sounder and saner men than himself. Denck, though
he is often reckoned an Anabaptist, and though for a
period he endeavored to shape the development of the
Anabaptists in the direction of his own ideals, belongs
more distinctly in this second group. Johann Biinderlin,
born in Linz, a town of Upper Austria about 1495,
Christian Entfelder, who first appears as pastor of a
flock in Moravia in 1527, and Sebastian Franck, born
at Donauworth in Schwabia in 1499, are other early
exponents of the spiritual ideals. Caspar Schwenck-
feld, born at Liegnitz in Lower Silesia in 1489, was more
distinctly interested than these other leaders in the
formation of a visible society — those of "the middle
way" — and he created a brotherhood that has survived
to the present time; but his ideas and ideals were of the
general type which characterize the aim at a "spiritual"
reform. Sebastian Castellio, a French humanist and
opponent of Calvin, born near Geneva in 1515, and
Dirck Coornhert, a prominent Dutch scholar, born in
Amsterdam in 1522, are two of the noblest interpreters
of these spiritual ideals and aspirations.

They were all strongly individualistic, and they felt
too little the importance of the help of a visible com-
munity. They had a naive, uncritical, and unquestion-
ing faith in inner divine guidance and personal revelation.
"The Kingdom of God," Denck says, "is in you, and he
who searches for it outside himself will never find it; for
apart from God no one can either seek or find God, but he
who seeks God already in truth has Him"; and again,
"He who does not know God from God himself does not
ever know Him." 8

Franck is a still more confident apostle of the inner way.
Many, he says, know and teach only what they have
picked up and gathered "without having experienced
it in the deeps of themselves." Hearing people read

8 From Denck's two tracts, Was geredet sei, etc., and Vom Gesetz Gottes.

ANABAPTISTS AND MINOR SECTS 239

and talk about God is " all a dead thing." The real Chris-
tian "must go inside and have the experience for
himself." 9

But in spite of the fact that they seem so individualistic
and concerned with personal experience in their own
souls, they are emphatically social in their sympathies.
Like the Anabaptists, they are interested in the common
man. They all alike make love, actual human love, the
mark of fellowship with Christ. They show a fresh inter-
est in man for his own sake. They all, with the exception
of Schwenckfeld, deny the depravity of man and they
refuse utterly to accept the dogma of "unfree will."
They realize that human life is a frail and tragic affair,
but it is, nevertheless, big with spiritual possibilities, and
the most splendid fruit of life is love. "To hate every-
thing that hinders love," is Denck's ideal of life. 10 Cas-
tellio declares that Christ's way always means love.
"You [meaning Calvin] may return to Moses if you will,
but for us others Christ has come." n Love, he con-
stantly insists, is the supreme badge of any true Chris-
tianity; the traits of the beatitudes in a person's life are
surer evidence that he belongs to Christ's family than
is the fact that he holds orthodox opinions on obscure
questions of belief. Franck has expressed as well as
any of the group, the way they felt about the invisible
Church: "The true Church is not a separate mass of
people, not a particular sect to be pointed out with the
finger, not confined to one time or place; it is rather a
spiritual and invisible body of all the members of Christ,
born of God, of one mind, spirit, and faith, but not
gathered in any one external city or place. It is a Fellow-
ship, seen with the spiritual eye and by the inner man.
It is the assembly and communion of all truly God-
fearing, good-hearted, new-born persons in all the world,

9 Franck's Faradoxa, Vorrede, sec. 18. and passim.
10 Vom Gesetz Gottes, p. 12. u Castellio's Contra Libellum Calvini.

240 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

bound together by the Holy Spirit in the peace of God
and the bonds of love — a Communion outside of which
there is no salvation, no Christ, no God, no compre-
hension of Scripture, no Holy Spirit, and no Gospel.
I belong to this Fellowship. I believe in the Communion
of saints, and I am in this Church, let me be where I
may; and therefore I no longer look for Christ in 'lo
heres' or 'lo theres.'" 12 This Church, which the Spirit
is building through the ages and in all lands, is, once
more, like the experience of the individual Christian,
entirely an inward affair. "Love is the one mark and
badge of Fellowship in it." 13 No outward forms of any
sort seem to him necessary for membership in this true
Church. "External gifts and offices make no Christian;
and just as little does the standing of the person, or
locality, or time, or dress, or food, or anything external.
The Kingdom of God is neither prince nor peasant, food
nor drink, hat nor coat, here nor there, yesterday nor
tomorrow, baptism nor circumcision, nor anything what-
ever that is external, but peace and joy in the Holy
Spirit, unalloyed love out of a pure heart and good con-
science and an unfeigned faith." u

The Kingdom of God, as they hold, is a kingdom of
experience, and they want every feature and detail of the
religious life to spring out of experience and to assist its
enlargement. "As often," Schwenckfeld writes, "as a
new warrior comes to the heavenly army, as often as
a poor sinner repents, the body of Christ becomes larger,
the King more splendid, His kingdom stronger, His
might more perfect." 15

All these men have but the slenderest interest in sacra-
ments. Sacraments have become for them what cir-
cumcision was for St. Paul when he wrote, "neither
circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but

n Paradoxa, Vorrede, sec. 8. 13 Ibid., sec. 9. " Ibid., sec. 45.

» Schwenckfeld's Schriften II, p. 290.

ANABAPTISTS AND MINOR SECTS 241

a new creation." Schwenckfeld treats this matter more
profoundly than any of the others. He meditated long
and deeply upon the question, studying the New Testa-
ment both broadly and minutely, while at the same time
he gave much thought to the fundamental nature of the
religious life. He took Judas as his test case. He argued
that if baptism and the supper were efficacious in them-
selves, then Judas, who received the supper from the
Lord himself, would have been saved by it. If the bread
and wine were changed into actual body and blood
of Christ, then he must have eaten of Christ and partaken
of His divine nature; but no corresponding change of
spirit appears in him. He came out from the supper
and immediately revealed an evil spirit. Schwenckfeld
finds the key to Christ's teaching on spiritual life in the
Johannine account of eating Christ's flesh and drinking
His blood. This assimilation of Christ is for him not a
figure, not a symbol, but a central fact. The risen and
glorified Christ, the incorruptible life-giving substance of
the God-Man, is the essential, necessary source of spiritual
life for men. He must become the actual food of the
soul. Not on rare occasions but continually, the true
nature of Christ must be received and assimilated into
the inner substance of our human spirits. No symbol
can be a substitute for that actual experience: "God
must Himself, apart from all external means, through
Christ touch the soul, speak in it, work in it, if we are
to experience salvation." 16 The Church which these
"reformers" were endeavoring to create was thought of
as a communion or fellowship of persons who were drawn
together and united by their intimate spiritual relation
with the living Christ. It was a Church after the Spirit,
and not an imperial institution possessed of magical
authority, employing mysterious sacraments, or holding
a final deposit of infallible doctrine. It was to be an

16 Schwenckfeld's Schriften I, p. 768 b.

242 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

organism rather than an organization. "No outward
unity or uniformity," Schwenckfeld wrote, "either in
doctrine or ceremonies or rules or sacraments, can make
a Christian Church; but inner unity of Spirit, of heart,
soul, and conscience in Christ and in the knowledge of
Him, a unity in love and faith, does make a Church of
Christ." 17

Jacob Boehme, born in Silesia in 1575, more completely
than any other single continental interpreter, gave a
many-sided expression to the faith and aspiration of these
spiritual leaders. 18 He is the culmination of the move-
ment. There are many other strands of influence in
Boehme, especially the theosophical and alchemic ideas
derived from Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Weigel. This
latter stock of inheritance proved a heavy weight to this
great tragic, but surely divinely inspired, mystic. The bar-
barous terminology, the baffling symbolisms, and the
literary limitations of this Silesian prophet, were always
a tremendous handicap; but in spite of all the obstacles,
difficulties, and hindrances a real heavenly vision and a
living message break through and get revealed in Boehme's
books. His most important permanent contribution to
Christianity is to be found in his interpretation of what
he calls the process of salvation as a way of life. Here he
is unmistakably "a spiritual reformer." He will not
put up with schemes or notions. He sets himself as
strongly against the substitution of doctrines of salvation
for an experienced process of salvation as Luther did
against the substitution of works for faith. "Thou
thyself," he says, "must go through Christ's whole
journey and enter wholly into his process." 19 He
opposes the Protestant tendency to make the Bible the
basis of reformed religion — he calls that another form of
"Babel-building," which does not reach all the way to

17 Schriften II, p. 785.

18 The influence of Schwenckfeld is most marked in Boehme.
M True Repentance.

ANABAPTISTS AND MINOR SECTS 243

God. The written letter-word is no true substitute for
the living Word of God in a man's soul. Theological
"opinions" are only "mental idols." The "immortal
seed of God" must come to birth in the soul, and Christ
must live and operate within. Boehme once more, like
his predecessors, is a builder of the invisible Church. He
makes nothing of sacraments. He turns inward rather
than outward. He separates religion wholly from State
connection. He wants a Christianity of prophets instead
of one of priests, and he calls men away from logical
systems to personal experience.

The writings of nearly all these men reached England
and were read by kindred spirits in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. John Everard is the first scholar
of importance who shows a familiarity with the body of
ideas and the type of Church set forth in the little books
of the spiritual reformers on the continent. He was
born in 1575, the year Boehme was born; he was a master
of arts and doctor of divinity from Clare College, Cam-
bridge. He was a student of the great mystics, and
later in life — after he was fifty — he translated tracts by
Sebastian Franck and Hans Denck and Castellio's edition
of The Golden Book of German Divinitie. Everard's
later sermons, printed in The Gospel Treasury Opened,
give the same general interpretation of Christianity
which his continental forerunners give. He was, before
everything else, a good man. He was too a man of
undoubted depth and power, and he shows both style
and humor. Though so often imprisoned that King
James I suggested that his name should be changed from
Everard [Everout] to "Dr. Never-out," yet his influence
was great, and he is almost certainly the first man in
England to hold and teach in any impressive way the
views of the spiritual reformers. He had important
disciples and many successors. The most noted of the
disciples was Giles Randall, another translator of spiritual

244 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

and mystical books. Francis Rous, Peter Sterry, John
Saltmarsh, and William Dell are good examples of the
kind of successors whom Everard had.

Meantime other developments were under way which
carried the ideas of the spiritual reformers forward into
the popular consciousness more extensively than did the
books and sermons of these Cambridge and Oxford
scholars. Groups of the common people formed into
little societies, and worked out in practice, in quiet, out-
of-the-way places, the ideals of these teachers. Attempts
of this sort were often made in Germany, where they were
generally soon suppressed. In Holland they were much
more successful, and in that country, where a semi-free-
dom of conscience was allowed, small sects flourished.
The most important of these independent sects were the
societies of the Collegiants, who held the fundamental
ideas of the spiritual reformers, with the added belief
that the present existing Church is only an interim-
church, and that God will soon send a new apostle, super-
naturally endowed and equipped, to be the beginner, the
founder, of the true Church of Christ. For this event
they looked and waited, and thus were called "Seekers."
They held that no one had the efficacious authority and
power to administer sacraments or to be the bearer of
an authoritative ministry-message. They therefore met
in silence and waited for the Spirit to direct them. They
looked after their own poor, watched carefully over the
moral life — the "walk and conversation" — of their
membership. They were socially minded and made love
and fellowship the marks of their communion. They
were opposed to oaths, and to the taking of human life,
and in other ways they showed their connection with
the common man's reformation in the sixteenth century.
During the period of the English Commonwealth numer-
ous groups of similar sects appeared in England. They
had strong, substantial members, and their leaders — for

ANABAPTISTS AND MINOR SECTS 245

they had unordained leaders — were able men and excel-
lent guides. Many other sects swarmed as the degree of
freedom increased. There were groups of the Family of
Love, who were followers of the mystic, Henry Nicholas,
born in Westphalia in 1501. There were Ranters, who
were pantheists and frequently were morally loose and
antinomian. In the years between 1646 and 1661 all
the writings of Jacob Boehme were translated into Eng-
lish, and now became a positive and powerful force, pro-
foundly influencing such intellectual men as Sir Isaac
Newton and John Milton, 20 and forming the basic reli-
gious conceptions of many less noted persons. All these
lines, including the groups of Anabaptists, converge and
receive their consummate expression in the Society of
Friends, which under the leadership of George Fox spread
throughout the English counties between 1648 and 1691,
the latter date being the year of George Fox's death.

More important, however, than the formation of any
religious organization was the silent propagation of truths
and ideas which spread across the world as winged seeds
fly abroad in the autumn. The contagion of thought
from mind to mind, from person to person, without any
visible organization, carried these ideals broadcast. They
became winnowed of chaff as time sifted them, and they
gained in weight and value as they lost their capricious
and erratic aspects. They heightened as they received
interpretation at the hands of wise and balanced thinkers,
and gradually they won the standing which their dis-
coverers could never succeed in giving them. Philo-
sophical movements unconsciously cooperated toward a
preparation of groups of people of ideals similar to those
of the spiritual reformers. Social and political forces also
became their allies. The religious and political experi-
ments in the American colonies assisted greatly in shap-
ing thought in the same direction, and the revolutions

20 See Bailey's Milton and Jacob Boehme (New York, 1914).

246 HARVARD THEOLOGICAL REVIEW

carried through by the people in America and in France
helped immensely to establish the principle of free con-
science, separation of Church and State, the inalienable
right of a man to be religious in his own way, while the
unorganized but irresistible forces of literature in Europe
and America, especially from Wordsworth's time on-
wards, worked silently and powerfully to emphasize
inward religion — the religion of the Spirit — and to make
dogma and ecclesiasticism less important. We find our-
selves at last in a world wholly changed from that which
the great reformers, the major reformers, endeavored to
make. Their ideals are not our ideals. Their concep-
tion of the Church is largely dead or dying. We are, it
must be admitted, not in the world of the spiritual re-
formers, but at the same time their ideals are much more
nearly our ideals, their spirit is kindred with ours, and if
they could become revenant, they would feel at home
with us now and would join heartily in spiritual com-
munion and fellowship in any of our live, active, for-
ward-looking church-groups today.